Ramblings of an Emergency Physician in Texas

Tumortown | Culture | Vanity Fair

Still and all, this is both an exhilarating and a melancholy time to have a cancer like mine. Exhilarating, because my calm and scholarly oncologist, Dr. Frederick Smith, can design a chemo-cocktail that has already shrunk some of my secondary tumors, and can “tweak” said cocktail to minimize certain nasty side effects. That wouldn’t have been possible when Updike was writing his book or when Nixon was proclaiming his “war.” But melancholy too, because new peaks of medicine are rising and new treatments beginning to be glimpsed, and they have probably come too late for me.